Professor Answers Television History Questions

I'm Charlotte Howell.

I'm an associate professor of film and television studies

at Boston University,

and I'm here to answer some questions from the internet.

This is TV History Support.

Let's go.

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Wellness Hippie asks,

When did TV become the devil and why?

Television has a long history,

stretching all the way back to the 1960s,

of being a bad media object.

One key moment in that history is in 1961

when Newton Minow, the head of the FCC at the time, said,

When television is good, there's nothing better.

But it's mired by homogeneity, sameness,

consumerism, and violence.

TV has become a vast wasteland,

and the term vast wasteland has become

really closely associated with television ever since.

But television, its origins are in radio, not in film.

Radio for a long period of time was really well regarded,

but also what you listened to

when you were doing other things;

it was also a domestic medium.

It's in your living room.

You cannot guarantee the quality or truthfulness

necessarily of the messages that are coming through,

and so there's a lot of anxiety around television

as a new medium, but interestingly,

that doesn't really happen until the late '50s

and early '60s.

There was more and more kind of overt commercialism on TV,

which many people point as like the real reason

why people talk about TV as the devil.

And so that connection with commercialism,

the domestic space,

and also that television has sometimes kind of been seen

as a feminine medium, especially, you know,

because of daytime programming and soap operas.

All of those things come together for this idea

of television as kind of a low art form.

Despite various moments of trying to offer

technological regulations to help parents determine

what programming their children could watch,

like the V-Chip in the '90s,

it is outside influences coming into the home.

That a lot of parents have historically had

some difficulty navigating how much,

what kinds of programming to let their children watch.

There were in fact Senate hearings in the 1960s

about violence on TV and how it affects children,

in part due to the popularity of Westerns among kids.

And so this is a kind of perennial question,

but I think it does television dirty

because television, like Newton Minow said,

When it's good, there's nothing better.

Art of the Real asks,

What was the first

late-night-type 'Tonight Show'-type show ever?

You might think it was The Tonight Show,

but in fact, if we look into the archives,

we'll find one figure: Faye Emerson.

Faye Emerson hosted a nighttime talk show

airing at 11:00 PM on CBS.

Now, it isn't exactly like a late-night talk show

as we would see it,

but it was an episodic format starting with

Faye Emerson coming out in a key outfit,

usually outrageous hat,

doing unscripted interviews with key people.

I didn't do so well with the opening gag.

[laughs] When your hat fell off!

Some of these politicians, stage and screen.

There was a real political vibe to the show

that would surprise a lot of people probably.

She would read fan mail

and then use it to create the topic of the day.

This created a real connection

between the fans and the host,

and really we can see the seeds of that growing

into things like celebrities reading mean tweets

on contemporary late-night talk shows.

But Faye Emerson is really where it starts.

From Cauliflower Nice,

How the hell did we go from 4 to 365 channels?

In fact, we've always had more than four channels.

In many cities, there were local independent TV stations;

many television sets could pick up about 13 channels

throughout the mid-century and into the '70s and '80s.

And then we have the kind of expansion of broadcast TV

with the creation of PBS in the late '60s.

We have the expansion of broadcast in the '80s and '90s

with new broadcast networks,

but I think what this question is really getting at

is how we get to cable television in particular.

And cable has this really interesting history

where it started off just to retransmit

essentially over-the-air broadcast stations

to people who are outside of the range

of the over-the-air signal of local stations.

But this new technology of cable laid in the ground,

privately owned, offers an opportunity,

and people are ready to jump on an opportunity

to make some more money on television outside of networks.

But the FCC has purview over cable

because they retransmit the over-the-air signals,

and they place a couple of limitations on cable.

And then HBO comes on the scene in 1975

and sues the FCC, saying,

These limitations are really hampering

our ability to compete,

and they win; the limitations are lifted.

The courts kind of determine that cable has greater

First Amendment right protections

than over-the-air broadcast,

which is why you can say various profanities on cable.

And then cable really expands,

dozens of channels at first.

And then in the '80s and '90s,

we have fiber optic cable starting to replace

the older system, expanding to hundreds of channels,

which is where we are today.

Executor of Judgment asks,

Anybody else disappointed with their families

after growing up with the '90s family sitcoms

and getting unrealistic expectations from those shows?

The TGIF Friday night block on ABC

from the late '80s all the way through

to the early 2000s were really family-oriented shows.

The TGIF block was very wholesome

because ABC was owned by Disney,

and so these families were meant to be idealistic.

They were there to kind of sell you

on this vision of the family,

even if it looks different

than the nuclear families of the 1950s.

They fit as well the changing kind of demographics

and norms of representing families on TV.

So we get a lot more Black cast sitcoms

like Family Matters, like Sister, Sister.

We have more blended families like Step by Step,

so kind of divorced or widowed families coming together.

But what we see now is that it wasn't standing out;

it was more expected,

as well as kind of the gender representation shifting

where a lot of these moms are working moms.

And so we have television in many cases

reacting to changing social norms

and then suddenly reflecting that

because it wants to speak to people

who want to see themselves on TV,

even if it's through a kind of, like, a rose-tinted view.

From the television subreddit:

What's the most egregious snub in Emmys history?

A snub means that it's expected to get nominated or to win.

That expectation is built through critical consensus,

and then oftentimes it's more of a retrospective

where some show continues to gain prominence and praise,

and the shows that beat it get a little bit lost in history.

So people point to The Wire

being only nominated for writing categories

and not winning as one of the key snubs.

Personally, I am always surprised

Battlestar Galactica didn't actually get much Emmy love,

especially given its allegorical connection

to the politics of the time.

But that's the point of the snub.

It is that critical consensus

that really we see driven in many ways

by the rise of television criticism from the '80s forward.

Camball 1998 asks,

Was 'I Love Lucy' the first big hit scripted TV show?

I Love Lucy was innovative in a key number of ways.

In particular, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz

created the production company Desilu,

and they conceived of I Love Lucy

as a television adaptation from the radio show

that Lucy was a star of.

But the thing was, the network, CBS,

wanted to shoot in New York.

Desi had a job in Los Angeles, so they said,

We will figure out a way to shoot it in Los Angeles.

They acquired soundstages, worked with Karl Freund,

who was a key director and cinematographer

from Hollywood film productions,

hired Jess Oppenheimer as one of the first

head writer/executive producer positions,

and created I Love Lucy

that would be shot with a three-camera setup

and shot on film.

Many scripted shows before I Love Lucy

were either aired live,

and the only version we have of them are kinescopes.

I Love Lucy determined they were gonna use

high-quality film stock.

CBS was like, This is too expensive.

So Lucy and Desi and Desilu Productions basically said,

We'll cut out some of our salary

for an ownership stake in the show.

Key, key, key decision.

This was the seed of a lot of where we are

in the media industries today

by thinking about this as not just

as it airs as live broadcast,

but thinking about as a show that could be preserved

and then sold later on.

We get this idea of television being valuable

not just when it airs,

but also for rewatching or re-airing,

really from I Love Lucy.

That's also why it's more prominent in our cultural memory,

and because I Love Lucy was such an investment,

it was a big hit.

From the history subreddit:

When did television with programming actually start?

Television as a technology actually started

in the '20s and '30s,

so there are a couple of TV stations

as early as the 1930s,

but the 1939 World's Fair television was presented by RCA

as coming soon to your living room

and promising programming to come soon as well.

Of course, World War II interrupted this development,

and manufacturing was needed for other means.

So when the war ends, 1945,

we have this battle of what television could be.

RCA said, We need to go TV now and black and white

because that's the technology

we have ready to go for manufacturing.

Westinghouse said, But we're close to color.

We could potentially have more channels.

And the FCC in 1945 sided with RCA

and basically adopted their TV now plan.

So we actually see a lot of wrestling and boxing

and pretty much only at nighttime.

It's not until about 1948, '49

that we really start to see television programming

as we know it.

Studio One on CBS, a live anthology program,

basically a play a week, starts in 1948.

The Goldbergs, the sitcom as we'd recognize it today,

starts in 1949.

Daytime doesn't really become a factor

until the early and mid-1950s,

as we get the Today show starting in the early 1950s

and then expanding the daytime schedule from there.

But in general, late 1940s

is when TV programming actually starts.

Let Bugs Live 2 asks, What makes 'Star Trek', 'Star Trek'?

Star Trek is an incredibly successful TV franchise.

Part of what makes Star Trek, Star Trek

is this idealized future

that sometimes is called a kind of liberal humanist future

where so many of the struggles we encounter today,

we have found a way past them.

And so it's a way to allegorically engage

with political issues at a bit of a distance.

It tells compelling stories.

You know you're gonna get a conclusion

by the end of the episode,

but Star Trek really is Star Trek because of its fans.

The Star Trek fandom, one,

created a letter-writing campaign

that helped to ensure that the series originally

in the 1960s could get a third season

to be then syndicated in reruns

so that it could keep being a part

of the television schedule even after it ended in 1969.

They created fan conventions, fan scenes,

kept a lot of the actors when they were out of work

after the series in kind of decent money standards

by paying for their appearances at conventions.

And so it built a really strong connection

between the franchise and the fans

that I think really makes Star Trek stand out

as a TV franchise.

Low Airport 397 asks,

What TV shows do you think made an impact on society?

The thing about television is that it and social change

are always in this dance with each other.

So we have this kind of, like,

increased movement of counterculture, protests,

shifts of the generation in the 1960s,

and we don't really see that reflected

on network television until the 1970s.

Maude showed the first time a main character

has an abortion even before Roe versus Wade was decided.

I don't understand your hesitancy.

When they made it a law, you were for it.

Of course, I wasn't pregnant then.

These shows were all about bringing

the explicit political discussions of the 1970s

into the comedic situation

and really getting at some of that reality.

Television brings a sense of simultaneity

into the living room,

and so we see that with the Civil Rights Movement,

the Vietnam War as well,

where these stories of these struggles

and the inequalities are in your living room,

and you can't really ignore it when it's there regularly

on the nightly news.

And you could also look at the '90s

with Ellen coming out on her sitcom.

Susan, I'm gay.

[audience laughing]

As really normalizing a particular type

of queer representation,

but absolutely bringing conscientiousness

into living rooms with a lot of people

who maybe hadn't encountered a lot of gay people

in their lives before then.

Fossils222 asks, What happened to Discovery History?

Think that means, TLC and other educational channels.

It's 99% reality TV.

Discovery, History, The Learning Channel;

these are cable channels that at various points

were more oriented towards education

and have since become more oriented towards entertainment.

But there's one cable channel that's not featured in here

because it's become so associated with reality TV

that we forget it was once a more educational

and high-end channel, and that's Bravo.

Bravo started out as international independent films

and performances and operas and the like,

and then it was bought by NBC and started to shift.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy hit,

and then we get Project Runway, Top Chef,

and the first of the Real Housewives franchise,

and now we think of Bravo as the home for reality TV

and reality TV franchises.

But I wanna talk also about reality TV.

Reality TV has its origins not on network TV.

The PBS docuseries An American Family in the 1970s

followed the Loud family.

It was meant to be a fly-on-the-wall kind of documentary

TV series, but there was a lot of drama

that happened with their divorce, the son came out as gay.

We see a lot of the seeds of reality TV,

but MTV really set a lot of the standards

of kind of exaggerated editing,

emphasized conflict with The Real World

that premiered in the 1990s.

And then we get reality TV as we understand it

and that high melodrama, high conflict,

really entertaining reality TV show hit

with Survivor on CBS in 2000.

That's also why we see it coming up everywhere on cable

because reality TV is much cheaper to produce

than scripted TV.

A question from Quora: How did life change

when the television was first released?

Television took quite a while to become heavily adopted,

but it really was building on some changes

that had already started in radio

of setting a clear schedule,

but now you had to sit and watch it

in what was increasingly designated rooms in homes

for the television set.

So it changed architecture, creating the den;

it changed some habits,

like we have to eat dinner before our show comes on,

but also the new industry of the TV dinner

so you could watch television and eat dinner together.

There was a lot of anxiety

about how much TV children were watching,

but that's true of pretty much,

I mean, comic books, video games, rap music, whatever.

But in general, those were some of the key changes.

From Ellikichi on Reddit:

I'm a wealthy American early adopter of TV in the 1940s.

What's on?

Well, it depends on what time in the 1940s

you're talking about.

If it's like 1946 or '47,

you'd pretty much have to be in New York,

maybe DC, maybe Philadelphia,

to even get a TV signal.

You're still mainly getting primetime programming,

but there were actually a lot of ethnic immigrants

and Black-led sitcoms in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Life with Luigi,

about an Italian immigrant in Chicago;

The Goldbergs,

about a Jewish American family in the Bronx

that started in 1949;

I Love Lucy,

a white woman and a Cuban man in a relationship.

This was a time that was speaking directly

to urban audiences

who were generally understood to be multicultural.

You also have live anthology drama series,

which are really well regarded.

This is where screenwriters

who maybe had been playwrights before

really got their start.

They wrote plays for television to be broadcast live.

You have 12 Angry Men,

which started on television

and then was turned into a play

and then was turned into an Oscar-winning film.

And you have live programming,

variety shows, some sports,

but it's mostly wrestling, boxing, indoor,

because baseball stadiums didn't all have lights

at that time.

So you have a real mix,

but it is a lot of live programming.

Gummy Worm Guy asks,

Which shows represent the modern golden age of television?

Well, the idea of a golden age really is

about kind of critical consensus.

In fact,

many of the shows considered and praised for golden ages

or as quality television don't have a lot of viewers,

but they have the right viewers,

according to advertisers sometimes, subscribers.

A lot of people would point at the start

being The Sopranos in 1999.

HBO tends to be where people point to the start

of what is considered by critics,

by awards-granting industries,

by a lot of kind of the general public

as the golden age.

The endpoint probably ends around the time

that Breaking Bad ends

because soon thereafter we enter a period of peak TV

where more and more television gets made,

but just don't get the noise and attention and eyeballs.

A golden age,

it's about differentiation from what is considered

the norm of television.

And so if we look at this modern golden age from,

say, The Sopranos to Breaking Bad,

including kind of the usual suspects,

Mad Men, maybe Game of Thrones,

Dexter on Showtime,

a lot of shows that feature male anti-heroes,

a lot of pushing the boundaries

and the edginess of TV

and really reacting to what was very popular

on broadcast TV at the time.

So a golden age often is only golden

because it's burnished by the perceived lack of shine

of some of what is considered regular TV.

Dacaptsworld asks,

What 5 to 10 shows revolutionized TV and why?

Dallas and General Hospital

in the '80s are a combo deal.

The rise of the soap opera is so important

to how we get more widespread serial dramas

and television production these days.

We don't get Grey's Anatomy without Dallas.

Julia, 1968, starring Diahann Carroll.

A complicated but really big leap forward

in terms of representation of Black women on TV,

a middle-class Black woman raising her son.

It was really about modeling a kind of a civil rights figure

and bringing a different type of Black representation

to American homes.

On All in the Family,

discussions of abortion and homosexuality,

trans characters, women's rights,

all of these different topics featured very prominently

in one of the most popular shows at that time.

And we don't get Cartman on South Park

without Archie Bunker

and his bigotry on All in the Family.

Shufflupaguss asks, How TF did TV work before digital?

Essentially, television before the digital transition

was over-the-air analog signal broadcast.

A local station would create a carrier signal

to bring the signal

that contained the audio and visual components

to everybody's antenna within reach.

And then the antenna would gather the signal

and translate it into audio and image format.

This is why you could have travel TVs in the 1960s.

If it had an antenna and a battery pack,

you could watch TV anywhere.

Rihanna's Side Dude asks,

How is 'South Park' even approved?

This show got 'Family Guy', 'American Dad!',

and 'The Simpsons' beat.

South Park in the '90s started out

as an experimental short film

that went kind of proto-viral online.

Christmas Is about something much more important.

What?

Presents. Ah.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone decided to develop it

as a TV show,

and eventually that show landed at Comedy Central.

It's a cable channel,

so it has more First Amendment protections

and more protections about vulgarity and profanity,

which of course this show revels in portraying.

How would you like to go see the school counselor?

How would you like to suck my balls?

South Park got written up

in The New York Times multiple times.

The controversy was good publicity in a lot of ways,

and it has continued to be South Park,

a key example of the kind of brand

that Comedy Central was

and that now kind of can be integrated

into various streaming platforms.

Woolfle 124 asks, Explain it like I'm five.

How did black and white TV turn to color?

Television could have always been in color,

and there have been TV shows shot in color

since the early 1950s.

As long as people were still buying

black and white television sets,

there was no incentive to transfer to color.

NBC really starts experimenting with some color broadcast,

mainly of one-off spectacles.

So the Rose Parade broadcast in color,

the 1955 production of Peter Pan on NBC.

And then it's really when we get to the kind of mid-1960s

where we start to see multiple nights of programs in color.

We move into essentially a color mandate of broadcast.

And you could only see these fabulous colors

if you had a brand new color television set.

Anytime we have new media technology,

the whole reason to get people to buy it

is to have programming on it

that they can only watch or engage with on that.

It's the same logic we see of streamers

with exclusive TV options nowadays.

It was: You want to be able to see these shows in color,

so you will buy a new TV set.

And oh, by the way, Westinghouse, RCA,

all of these throughout TV history

have a long history of investment in television networks,

and so they can kind of drive

the production cycle somewhat as well.

Armega asks, What exactly is a syndicated TV show?

Syndicated just means a company

that sells directly to local stations.

Now, you've seen your local station

probably show local news.

That's one way to fill in time.

But on weekends, afternoons,

what we often see is syndicated shows;

either second-run syndication,

what we would call reruns,

or it's a first-run syndicated show,

bypasses the network entirely,

sells directly on off-network scheduled time slots

to the local station.

Baywatch started one season on NBC.

NBC decided not to go forward with it.

Its producer decided to keep making it

and try in syndication.

Incredibly successful.

Xena: Warrior Princess

and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Natalie2727 asks,

Why do you think Westerns were so popular

on TV in the 1950s?

The decline of the Hollywood film Western

is one of the main reasons;

they weren't producing the same amount of films

that they had during the 1930s through 1950s.

Meanwhile, television has moved out to Los Angeles

and realized that there are all of these resources

put in place in making dozens of Westerns a year.

So you have experts in horse training, stunt people,

you have the sets and the ghost towns.

There's also a social reason, right?

The 1950s is a time of some dramatic shifts

in terms of gender roles.

The move to white-collar work was really kind of

destabilizing for these ideas of masculinity.

And the Western has always been a text about masculinity,

a frontier masculinity,

and that I think was also really, really resonant

for the 1950s.

From JustDay1788:

Does anyone else feel like network TV really just gave up

after the rise of streaming?

There's this assumed differentiation

between the networks and streaming,

but in a lot of cases, the networks

and streaming services are owned

by the same conglomerate parent company.

Now I think what this is really addressing

is the feeling that a lot of emphasis now

from production companies, from the major studios,

is on streaming.

And I think that's true.

That's the audience they're chasing.

Network TV, as some executives have described it,

is essentially one shelf for a TV show

to wait to be licensed for streaming services

and to build an audience to make that deal sweeter.

But always remember,

it's a couple of companies

that basically control everything.

Sick Thighs asks, Is public access still a thing?

Could I watch a public access channel on my TV right now

if I wanted to?

If you have cable, probably.

Public access really rose to prominence around cable

because cable providers were required

to carry local public education and governmental channels.

And some of them at early points

actually provided studio space, camera equipment,

support for public access programming.

In New York in the 1970s, there was avant-garde,

like Man Sits in a Bathtub for a Half an hour,

programs on the local cable access channel.

There were forums of lesbian groups, punk shows.

Public access is the promise of television

that's more democratic, more local.

But as with many things,

it's largely gone away because it's too expensive.

Much of what would be on public access

has moved in the last 15 years to YouTube.

SnowyEclipse01 asks,

Why did old television stations sign off after dark?

They didn't have any more programming left.

We don't get 24-hour programming really until cable.

CNN is one of the kind of early

Let's program for 24 hours,

mainly because they had to hit a wide variety of time zones

and cable channels really had to do that,

whereas local TV stations only had to reach

their local TV audience.

The network wasn't providing content after late night,

and it was too expensive to run

and maintain the local station and pay for programming.

So they signed off and that was it.

That's everything for today.

I hope you learned something.

Thanks for watching TV History Support.

Catch you next time.

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